New cmd-line option 'g'

[Chad Walstrom]

Late last night (the only time of the day I have free any more), I
committed a changeset to CVS that introduced a new command-line option
to each of the utilities: -g|--global-databases-file.  This option
allows you to specify the path of the ``databases'' file at run-time,
which in turn points to the location of GNATS databases on the system.
I chose 'g' as the option simply because it wasn't being used by any
of the command-line tools.  I still need to update the documentation
(*.info and *.man pages) with the new option, but at least we're
getting somewhere. ;-)  (I'm not really happy about using global
variables, but it was the quickest solution available.)

This is an important feature, as it allows us to now build a suite of
test scripts using autotest (from autoconf).  Monotone's integration
of autotest to build a comprehensive regression test suite is
inspiring.  I'll probably borrow heavily from their implementation to
get ours off the ground, and the first test I plan on writing is for
BUG#491 and Alex's patch.

If we find ourselves needing to make this type of change again, there
is a nice framework tool for command-line utilities called GNU
Gengetopt [1] that generates the options parser.  It would certainly
help with consistency.

Anyway, back to the grind.

References
==========
1. http://www.gnu.org/software/gengetopt/gengetopt.html

-- 
Chad Walstrom <address@hidden>           http://www.wookimus.net/
           assert(expired(knowledge)); /* core dump */